Bob Greenyer has posted an interesting piece speculating what the "cat" and "mouse" are in Rossi's E-Cat:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2015/09/06/the-new-fire-mk1-bob-greenyer/ Greenyer suggests that the "mouse" is a process that results from the occasional transmutation of nickel by H- ions. In this process, some reactions are thought to fail to occur and result instead in the ejection of an energetic proton. The "cat" is suggested to be the p+7Li → 2He reaction, in which two alpha particles are expelled with around 16.8 MeV by my calculations, neglecting electrons. Note that that makes 2.1 MeV per nucleon, which is pretty fast. I suspect that the H- ion business in Piantelli's patents, where the ion is said to be forced into orbit with a nickel atom (or other transition metal atom), is purely wishful thinking on Piantelli's part. For the low levels of transmutation, I'm inclined towards the action of electric arcing at the microscopic level, which seems like an obvious candidate to me for this kind of thing. For the "cat," the p+7Li → 2He reaction that Greenyer points to is an interesting one. It would help explain the depletion of 7Li in favor of 6Li seen in the Lugano test. What I like a lot about Greenyer's analysis is that Rossi's "cat" and "mouse" are not physical systems but instead reaction pathways. Eric
